The tanning industry is feeling the burn of Obamacare’s 10 percent tax on tanning services.
Business owners say the 10 percent tax on tanning services as part of Obamacare has hurt the industry’s bottom line and has caused 10,000 out of 18,000 stores to close, the Associated Press reports.
The industry has also suffered due to public health campaigns about the dangers of tanning and laws put into place to restrict the use of tanning salons for minors.
Forty-two states regulate the use of tanning salons for minors, according to the National Council of State Legislators.
The reason the tax was put into place back in 2010 was to reduce rising melanoma rates and curb a practice that has been linked to skin cancer, according to CBS News.
People who use tanning beds before the age of 35 have a 75 percent chance of developing skin cancer, according to the Skin Cancer Foundation. The foundation says that 419,000 cases of skin cancer are linked to indoor tanning.
The revenue from the tax was meant to support Obamacare and raise up to $2.7 billion over 10 years.
However, the actual revenues of the tax have been far below projections.
The federal government projected it would collect $300 million in revenue from the taxes in 2014, but actual figures showed the federal government only raked in $92 million that year, according to The Tax Foundation.
Revenue shortfalls caused the Joint Committee on Taxation to change its initial estimate for the tanning tax revenue from the original $2.7 billion figure over 10 years to $1.5 billion, according to a memo from The Joint Committee on Taxation from June 2012.
The industry has said that the tax has destroyed 81,000 tanning jobs, according to the Associated Press.
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